This – more or less – was the gist of a talk given Wednesday by Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer, who used the occasion of the annual Web 2.0 conference to wax poetic on the capabilities of Windows Phone 7, the mobile OS launched last year by Microsoft.

"You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows phone and you do to use an Android phone.… It is hard for me to be excited about the Android phones," Mr. Ballmer said, according to the UK Telegraph.

"Both [an iPhone and a Windows phone] are going to feel very good in your hand and both [are] going to look very beautiful physically…. but when you grab a Windows phone and use it … your information is front and center … and you don’t have to scroll through seas of icons and blah blah blah," Ballmer added. "A Windows phone gets things done."

These are bold words, especially considering the market penetration of Windows Phone over the past year. In November 2010, Comscore, which monitors this sort of thing, reported that Windows Phone had a 9 percent slice of the overall US smartphone market. By April of this year, that number had shrunk to 6.7, and by August, it was down to 5.7.

In happier news, this week Microsoft announced it was "opening the spigot" on Mango, the next iteration of the mobile OS. Mango will soon be available for "nearly everyone," Microsoft's Eric Hautala wrote in a blog post.

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